News Cindy Sheehan Arrested at White House Protest

[Moonbear]

On the matter of loitering, this as far as I can tell is mainly to protect business owners. If I own a shop and there is a large group of people gathered outside my store which is detering paying customers from entering my establishment I'd liek to have some manner of taking care of that.

You mean like the animal rights protesters in front of the fur shop? In the town where I grew up, this was a regular occurrence. The funny thing was that the fur shop was small and tucked back so it was pretty hard to see from the highway...I never knew it was there until the protesters showed up. I think the protesters actually helped their business by getting people to notice the shop.

My friends and I had a guy working at a seven eleven tell us that he was going to call the cops on us if we didn't leave his parking lot. We had bought refreshments in the store and were playing chess on the hood of my friend's car. Really nasty scary people we must be huh?

Yep, nothing but chess-playing rabble rousers! Of course, in that case, if he owned the parking lot, he could throw you off it for any reason he wanted. You might have thought differently about it if you were standing on the public sidewalk just chatting while deciding where to go next or waiting for another friend to pick you up and drive you home.

 

[russ_watters]

Yeah, that's another law I never understood. Of course it only gets enforced when someone doesn't like the look of the person standing around. It seems if you stand outside in a business suit, people assume you're waiting for your ride home or for an appointment with someone inside, but if you stand around wearing ripped jeans, have a few tattoos and your lip pierced, someone's going to call it loitering. Mostly it's used in areas with a lot of drug dealing or prostitution to keep the "bad elements" off the streets, but that means you're arresting people for looking suspicious or standing around the wrong place, not because they've actually done anything wrong.

As a matter of fact, one of the biggest groups targeted for that is affluent whites being in places where you wouldn't expect them to be. The assumption being that affluent whites don't hang around in run-down parts of the city at 2:00 in the morning unless they are looking to score some drugs.

 

[revelator]

That's kinda funny. I figure it's the people who already have drugs and aren't looking to score, that would be the most worthwhile to arrest. There's no law being broken by the dude who doesn't yet have any drugs.

 

[Evo]

That's kinda funny. I figure it's the people who already have drugs and aren't looking to score, that would be the most worthwhile to arrest. There's no law being broken by the dude who doesn't yet have any drugs.

The point in Russ' scenario would be to make them leave the area, thus (supposedly) thwart their efforts to buy drugs.